Thursday, 29 April 2010

"We would be delighted if Chris Evans came to see The Mourning Show and have already contacted him and informed him of this opera. If he objected, we would still perform it anyway. We would hope that if he did ever hear about the show he would see it as a declaration of our love towards him...after all I'm ginger just like he is...still, I could imagine that he might get a little bit upset because he dies at the end. But don't we all?" ERIK BUMBLEDONK

Erik Bumbledonk is an actor, comedian, composer, writer and film-maker. He will be releasing a CC licensed album on Chinstrap under the Plushgoolash moniker in the very near future.

And here's a clip of Mr Bumbledonk in action, in two pieces written by Ergo Phizmiz from 2002-2003-ish. Act 1 & Act 4 of "Komediergophizmiz". Both contain some RUDE WORDS.

Monday, 26 April 2010

"For this COM.POST Ergo Phizmiz made a suitcase opera. easy to transport but impressive in it's refined content and output.

An evening of adventures homegrown operesqette business about about the English talk radio DJ Chris Evans doing a phone-in show. Somehow by the end he'll be dead.

This year the term 'Memetism' is a guideline to create new performative soundpieces leaning forward or bending over to opera, ritualistic slaughter, group autistics, chamber meetings amongst others.

The research element for this production will come through the combination of various historical operatic compositional models into a mad amalgamation of self-reflective music.

The evening will be served with a program around this masterpiece, existing of the following bits:-A collage film about opera, demonology, and the ideas / processes of The Mourning Show-A series of drawings and collages on opera-A special party mix of opera-pop-A set of foundsound by The Travelling Mongoose

THE MOURNING SHOW will have its try-out at Extrapool, Nijmegen at thursday 6 may.

On Sunday 10 may it will play in Les Atelier Claus, Bruxelles.

Later this year it will do another tour in Holland, France, Germany and Poland

COM.POST is financially supported by the Mondriaan Foundation, the City of Rotterdam Department of Culture, Nederlands Fonds voor Podiumkunsten+,the Pact op Zuid, the Stichting ter bevordering van Volkskracht and Vestia."

Friday, 2 April 2010

Tune into Soundart Radio anytime over Easter weekend to hear Ergo Phizmiz's sound-installation "Forest", a perpetually changing and shifting sound installation inspired the world of the Brothers Grimm.

The sounds in Forest were originally created as part of Ergo's multimedia installation for Venn Festival, 2008, built up in realtime over the course of the installation on instruments in the gallery space. Below you can watch a video of Venn, featuring footage of the Forest installation.

We are very pleased to announce that we are now giving a download of our album Perpetuum Mobile (by People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz) away for free! This is still available as a CD with beautiful packaging, from our shop but if you like your mp3s then here they are...

Here's the press release for this wonderful offering by People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz:

"Perpetuum Mobile" is the result of a uniquely schizophrenic "open source" compositional process: the UK's finest collage composers Ergo Phizmiz and People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett) uploaded files to a shared server, downloaded and processed each other's work, and flung the resulting fragments back at each other. The result is an interpenetrating audio-collage so intricate that neither party can recall who did what to whom. So far, so avant-garde; but what makes this record different is that Ergo and Vicki then wrote and sang their own vocals on top of their Frankenstein creation. Here you will find slyly absurdist lyrics replete with monkeys, carousels, trousers, apple trees, tinkling bells, dogs, sausages, whiskey, and cannibalism. No matter how fraught with trauma, these ballads and ditties are sung with a straight face and mixed front and center, and the results feel like 1930s British music hall standards from an alternate universe: half Ivor Cutler, half George Formby. The astonishing thing is that for all this jiggery-pokery, "Perpetuum Mobile" makes for an exhilarating, remarkably fresh pop album. It works. On "Ghosts Before Breakfast" Ergo and Vicki proudly declare that they've got "quite a selection of pastry", and if the profusion of cuckoo clocks, gunshots, horn farts, string vamps, and digital malfeasance which go hurtling through this opening track is any indication, that's no idle boast. For sheer cornucopia of sonic raw materials, this track's avalanche of information sets the tone for the overflowing, manic record that follows. There's far too much to fully parse, but among the highlights: "Beyond Perpetuum" pushes off from the Comedian Harmonists' take on the 19th century compositional craze for "moto perpetuo" runs of continuous notes at a rapid tempo, and folds found piano, voice and strings into an interlocking array of M.C. Escher harmonic stairways. "Air Hostess" is detourned lounge pop that stitches together Nelson Riddle's "Ya Ya" theme to "Lolita", "Walk Right In", light operettas, organ, bachelor pad cha cha and mambo, and nervously twitching shards of Louis Armstrong. "Pierrot's Persecution Mania" bravely explores the possibilities of a Montparnasse-via-Dixieland hybrid of can-can and bluegrass, with ridiculous canned strings colliding with jew's harp boings, while "Soggy Style" rides banjo twangs, a digital bossa nova breakdown, and the "whooo-ooes" nicked from Terry Stafford's "Suspicion". Living up to the perpetual motion of its title and cock-a-hoop cover art, this is a frantically energetic music whose layered repetitions become cumulatively more disorienting and preposterous as they loop back. "Perpetuum Mobile" goes beyond the stealth-oldies nostalgia of the mashup scene and the "culture-jamming" rhetoric of plunderphonics, and shows Mr. Ergo and Ms. Vicki to be a potent, if Surrealist, songwriting team, and together they braid oddly affecting vocals and their trademark stolen audio into twenty-first century pop. Like the perpetual motion machines for which it is named, this collaboration will run and run and run and run and run and run and runŠ - Drew Daniel